I used to get the poor kid's meal when I was very young. They made us stand as a group aside in a line and let all the other kids get their full-sized meals first, then would give us our half-sized shitty sandwich after everyone else walked passed and stared at us.
Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty.
That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.
Whoa that is very different than my experience decades ago. Whether your lunch was free, discounted, or full price, that happened at the cashier. Everyone waited in the same line. Your experience is way too early to introduce kids to how bad capitalism. Let them dream!
Implementation of free and reduced-cost lunches varies considerably across the US states. In many places, it's discreet and private, but also in many places, the process is deliberately designed to 1. call attention to and shame people, and 2. make it difficult to use and easy to be denied.
And yes, you can probably easily guess which kinds of places focus on the cruelty, and which kinds of places focus on the helping.
It reminds me of a similar discussion here around overdue lunch fees, graduation, and how ridiculously small the amount ends up being for an entire school at the end of the year (I think the article was about the person just walking in and paying it all).
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, but I still feel a warm spot in my heart from projects like this. I still have (and use!) my HP48SX from my high school days, and it still works like it always has. There is something to be said for a device's limitations, and I mean that honestly. It's very powerful for what it is, but its processing limitations keeps me from overextending, which is something very easy to do with the pocket supercomputers we've all gotten used to carrying around over the previous decade. (And its keys are simply a delight to press compared to even the best glass touchscreen.)
Ripley being the survivor was a rug pull on the audience's expectations. Tom Skerritt (Dallas) was a well-known actor at the time, and would have been assumed to have been the default lead.
When I turned 50 I started capping my max weights because I was more worried about long-term joint and ligament health than ultimate strength. I no longer lift above two plates (225lbs) for anything, even though that is well below my deadlift, squat, etc.
It's been a couple years, now, and honestly I wish I'd made the change sooner. I haven't lost any functional strength, and my recovery is a lot smoother. Haven't had any injury since, either.
I’m almost 30 and made this change about a year ago.
I now rotate between high rep (sets of 20 rep max) and medium weight weeks (sets of 8-12 reps). My joints haven’t ached in a while and I’ve become much less prone to random muscle tweaks. Mike Isreatel has an excellent intro to high rep training [0]. It produces pumps and mind-muscle connection like nothing else!
I actually went too far into the high rep/volume training direction for several months, but realized I needed to reincorporate medium weight lifts when I started losing a bit of grip strength. I am now super content with my current rotation cycle!
I'm over 50, and I am back chasing the 1,2,3,4 plate standards at a lower bodyweight than when I first achieved it.
The only change I've made is two train only twice a week, rather than three or four times. Thinking of doing the split in Radically Simple Muscle, though, where it is 2 heavy compound lift days per week and a 3rd bodybuilding/machine day.
Old Persian cuneiform was designed from scratch and is essentially an alphabet. It has almost nothing in common with Sumerian Cuneiform, which is what most people think of if they refer to "cuneiform".
I thought it was a strange choice, not because I think anyone ordering from that site has an opinion on the merits of different types of cuneiform, but because I think the Old Persian glyphs are much simpler and will therefore appear less ornamental than e.g. Akkadian would.
Those who do have an opinion of the merits of different types of cuneiform are ordering custom items from Jeremiah Peterson.
The choice of Old Persian cuneiform is lazy, much like those Egyptian cartouche name necklaces that use a hieroglyphic alphabet rather than even attempting to write out a name as ancient Egyptians would.
That's probably an exception. I'd never depend on being able to use a $100 bill in general. In Massachusetts, I've actually had to do some chasing down of $100 bills as trip reserve money. Not sure I could get anything larger than a $20 from a major bank's ATM. But I guess we're an impoverished state.
Well, yes. We'll risk the $100 bill vs. not being paid at all.
The point stands that, in my experience, $100 bills are an outlier in most of the US and will, at a minimum, invite additional scrutiny or simply be refused in many situations.
If you insist, they could take me to court for not paying the bill, at which time they'd have to accept USD for the debt.
So yes, they could refuse the $100 and then sue me, at which point they'd have to take it. So you'd get a big clap for technically "winning" this argument but in possibly the dumbest way possible.
In practice, the reason why 'legal tender for all debts' is relevant is because it pretty much forces to take my $100 or go through an expensive process to just end up with the same result.
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
As someone who tried those kickstarter specials... They just aren't there unless you use a laser-based system, which are many thousands of dollars. You'll get a point cloud that is close-ish for whatever part you're scanning, but unless it's strictly decorative, you're going to find pretty quickly that it's faster to just re-create the thing from scratch if you need any kind of dimensional accuracy. The scans are somewhat useful as on-machine references, but that's it.
Also, scanning is a lot more work than you'd naively think. Reflections are the enemy, the matte spray used for scan prep is messy and expensive. It was fun to play around with, and I learned a lot, but my current advice is don't bother, you'll just be disappointed.
Years ago I lived in an apartment where the vent hood above the range was an overpowered commercial unit instead of the usual home stuff. It genuinely surprised me how much of a difference it made compared to 'normal' vent hoods. Higher extraction volumes, even without side walls, makes a big difference.
For around 2k it is possible to install a vent hood with the fan outside the building so it is completely silent, and has way more air flow than anything that fits above the range.
Complete silence, performance beyond anything people are used to at home. Most people don't even know the choice exists, and even if you go to a bougie specialty cooking store they'll try to dissuade you from this and instead sell you on a higher priced product that doesn't work as well.
What's annoying with both air cleaners and vent hoods, is that it seems some sellers have figured out that they want them to make noise, so people hear they are working. It's possible to make both much more quiet than they typically are.
One of the first upgrades I made to my house was buying a nice (interior) vent hood. The exterior ones need to be at least a few feet away from the stove, and my stove is right up against the wall it vents out of. I still was able to find an interior one that has 1/2 the noise and twice the airflow of the standard builder grade vent hood.
One annoyance is that almost none of the vent hood stick out far enough, ideally you want the vent hood to stick out a few inches (at least) past the front of the cook top, but almost none of them do that (likely due to head bumping issues, understandable) so a lot of effluent still escapes.
Higher extraction volumes also make heating and cooling bills go up.
It's one of those ideas that works fine when it's just a rare thing, but if 100% of households had one I guarantee we'd see headlines like "Wasteful Exhaust Vents Burn As Much Energy As Cleveland" etc etc.
I for one welcome our fume hood inspired overlords. The nice thing about fume hoods is that they're optimized for maximum extraction efficiency for a minimum extraction volume.
Everyone notices the side walls, but an overlooked secret of fume hoods is that they extract air backwards toward the back wall, not just upward.
Any air extraction pulls conditioned air out of the house - kitchen hoods, dryers, bath fans, etc. Only kitchen hoods exhaust a significant amount of air - the solution is a makeup air system.
Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty.
That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.